Double Bill Mini Musings: Fire Walk (or Run) With Me...

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me:
I've been on a big old Twin Peaks kick this November/December - thanks to the much-improved Horror Channel, and then the spiffing 10-disc box set - so naturally I would be checking out this prequel.

I wouldn't call it "revelatory", as the box art proclaims, but as a newly created big fan of the show, what it actually is, is fascinating, horrific, delerious, weird, disturbing, entrancing and transfixing. I'm not a huge fan of Daivd Lynch's movies, but I have seen a number of them over the years, and considering I had 25 hours and 35 minutes worth of Twin Peaks to go on before venturing into this dark telling of Laura Palmer's last seven days, it has been the most up-to-speed I have ever been for a David Lynch movie.

Indeed I feel after this concentrated Twin Peaks fascination I've just experienced, that I better understand Lynch's work (even though he co-created the show itself with Mark Frost). Perhaps people read too much into his work - in fact, I'm sure of it - film theorists are notorious for reading things into movies and making the simple utterly, utterly complicated, and then film viewers go in expecting it to be a head-screw when in fact things are actually a little more as they seem. It's just that oftentimes, the things as they seem just so happen to be bizarre, dreamlike things.

That's how Twin Peaks plays out - like a dream - and like in dreams, weird things happen inexplicably in the background, and the narrative of your dreams take weird and wonderful divergent turns whenever they feel like it ... and sometimes, weird things just happen. You see something weird that pops inexplicably into your life, or something weird happens to you when you least expect it, and suddenly a whole world of possibilities opens up.

So perhaps with Lynch's work things are actually a little bit more as-they-seem, despite what your assumptions (developed by years of reading-in by theorists) suggest.

The world of Twin Peaks is, simply put, a tale of good and evil, of internal battles, of incest, rape, murder, drugs, infidelity, and everything in-between and - as co-creator Mark Frost said - you'd expect such themes to present themselves in a big city, but in fact it's all here in Twin Peaks - and that's the selling point.

As for the tie-in prequel movie, which unfortunately didn't set the world on fire (thus nixing any possibility of follow-ups that we Peaks Freaks (new and old alike) would have loved to have had considering the cliffhanger end to season two), it dives full-on into territory that is merely alluded to in the TV show - no wonder it's rated 18. It recontextualises what you see in the TV show, and casts a significantly dark shadow over some key characters.

It's a beautiful, hypnotic, slightly confusing, ever-so-unnerving film, and despite being not quite so satisfying in certain areas (i.e. there's not an awful lot of Agent Dale Cooper, even considering the timeline of the movie's plot), it does really satisfy in others. Laura Palmer was the catalyst for the entire series, and was essentially the focus for the majority of the episodes, but all after (and because of) her death. Here she's alive and right at the heart of the storytelling in all it's entrancing, disturbing, and horrific ways.


Marathon Man:
Not an awful lot to say about this one, but I do love a good 'New Hollywood era' movie from the 1970s. The moral ambiguity, the gritty realism of the filmmaking and the New York setting, the non-traditional leads, and the plots - so full of paranoia - a mirror to the confused, bruised and battered psyche of America after the the Vietnam war and various political upheavals in the period when the innocence of the post-war years was lost forever. Marathon Man is one of the films that expertly illustrated this complex state of the nation.

One scene particularly gripped me - when the central antagonist ends up in precisely the sort of area of town they wouldn't want to be recognised - oh and, of course, the famous "is it safe?" sequence.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story...

What with the horrid likes of Date Movie/Epic Movie/Meet The Spartans floating around, like floaters in the porcelain bowl of life, it's a genuine pleasure to come across a proper spoof - rather than a 'Vague Genre Movie' (check out Maddox's site for a witty-as-usual piss-take of such piss poor efforts as Meet The Spartans).

Walk Hard pretty much lampoons one movie only - Walk The Line (the excellent Johnny Cash biopic) - and then goes off on it's own, as if Walk Hard wasn't based on anything at all. It takes one idea, then runs with it on its own. It doesn't take clips from YouTube and insert them hap-hazardly into 300 vs Transformers mash-up 'jokes'.

It truly is a shame that Spartans can take the number one slot, it really is, because it means there's enough people stupid enough to pay to see such garbage.

Anyway, back to a quality spoof in the shape of Dewey Cox ... while perhaps a tad overlong (the 1970's period begins to flag a little), there's a genuine sense of humour amidst the quite faithful spin on the Cash biopic. It's silly throughout, but in a smart way - rather than stupid in a really dumb, moronic, un-original way like Date/Epic/Meet.

There is a danger with all this though, by which I mean the flood of Apatow-related flicks coming out. While he and his various teams are all highly talented, very funny people producing genuinely hilarious movies with real heart & even soul behind them, you don't want to overdose the audience. You never want to hear "ANOTHER movie with Seth Rogen?!" - mind you, such a thing is far from a depressing vision, but even too much of a good thing too fast can be bad.

Hopefully they've already realised this issue, it would be a shame for audiences to tire of the Apatow/Rogen/et al freight train, especially prior to the sure-to-be-excellent Zack & Miri Make A Porno.

Apatow & Co fans, rest assured, Walk Hard will be right up your street. As for the Date/Epic/Meet morons, this is how you're supposed to make a spoof movie - if you're still not convinced how to do it, watch Airplane! as well.